This backyard entertainment space in Washington was completed in the fall of 2023. It’s still filling in and small tweaks are still in the works so I’m looking forward to watching this garden mature. Unfortunately, that might not happen. The property is currently for sale. I wanted to take a moment to talk about this project. The topic is groundcovers, those small, colonizing plants that add a green layer to the ground plane and their use in the landscape. Groundcovers play such an important roll in the landscape yet I feel like they’re an afterthought in many landscape designers and landscapers minds. Yes, they will minimize garden maintenance by covering the ground and preventing seeds from germinating. They also add another layer of plants to the landscape which always helps aesthetically but their biggest benefit is their ability to bind a garden together. In my opinion, a lot of landscapers and designers don’t put enough emphasis on groundcovers in their landscape projects. I see a lot of gardens designed one of two ways. In scenario one, future plant growth is taken into consideration, plants are spaced correctly but there is a sea of mulch separating each plant. In scenario two, plants are spaced so close that the spacing doesn’t allow for any future growth. I don’t know if it’s just a lack of knowledge or just an attempt to remove any awkwardness that a sea of mulch creates. I see these two scenarios often in Litchfield County.
When a garden is designed where no plant touches a neighboring plant and mulch separates each plant, your eye will never take the plant grouping, or garden for that matter, as a cohesive whole. Your eye will see a bunch of individual plants. This creates a dilemma. I’m all for correctly spacing plants and I’ll also admit that a bunch of individual plants in a sea of mulch doesn’t provide much of a garden experience. To avoid awkwardness in newly planted landscapes, I see a lot of landscapers push plant spacing way too close. They are planted as if nothing will ever grow or mature. These gardens typically become a maintenance nightmare. To alleviate the situation, a lot of plants are removed within a couple years. The approach I’ve always taken as a designer is to try to pick the right plants for the right place by taking into consideration the size of the space, the soil and sun exposure. After choosing the right plant, we space these plants not on what size they are today but at a height and width it will be down the road or at least at a height that is easily manageable down the road. This is where the awkwardness usually happens with new landscape installations. A Holly might be installed at a height and width of 2.5′. Over a ten year period, that plant will become a 10’x10′ behemoth. Is the plan to let the Holly grow to 10’x10′? Or will the plant be managed somewhere in between 2.5′ and 10′? If two Hollies are planted side by side at a width of 2.5′, and the plant will be managed at 6’x6′, they should be planted at least 6′ on center. Newly planted as 2.5′ plants, you’ll have 3.5′ of mulch separating each plant. This is where groundcovers become so valuable. Not only will they help prevent weeds from germinating but they will add a layer of green. That green layer won’t interfere with the larger plants and that low vegetation will help tie those plants together.
Another asset of groundcovers is that they are great for softening edges. As you can see by the before and after pictures of this patio, we surrounded the patio with low, spreading edgers. These low edgers soften all the hard edges of the granite, giving the garden a much more natural feel to the space. Without groundcovers spilling over the edgers of the granite, this garden would have a much different feel.
Ajuga ‘Chocolate Chip’ softens the edge of this granite patio.
